Robert Peake

Chris Tonelli gave an excellent talk on limited-run small press publication. Rather than attempting to expiate small presses in light of an overwhelmed marketplace for poetry, Chris instead focused on the community-building aspects of small press and book-arts projects. For example, his So And So Reading Series in Boston works in collaboration with Rope-a-Dope Collaborative to produce letterpress broadsides of featured poets’ poems, which they sell on the night of their reading.

Drawing on Lewis Hyde’s idea that art exists in both a gift economy and market economy, he pointed out how limited-run collaborative publications foster community by delivering a select number of high-quality works to artist, collectors, and aficionados who truly appreciate the work. This has been my own experience firsthand in rather serendipitously entering in to my first book arts collaboration — that the collaboration itself was a gift between artists that then extended out to appreciative communities. Thanks to Chris for flying out to the Pacific University campus to deliver his unique perspective on community publishing.

“The more sacred the slain cow, the tastier the feast.”

Denise Duhamel gave a laugh-out-loud funny talk on an oft-undervalued aspect of poetry: humor. She showed how classic stand-up tricks, like following the main punch-line with “tags,” mangled cliches and malapropisms, and, above all, a tone in satire that admits complicity — a kind of poking fun at the speaking self alongside all humanity — can serve to open up a funny poem to more than just laughs. How fitting that she deliver this talk on the heels of the news of George Carlin’s death, in the ha-ha-ouch age of Stephen Colbert. She spoke to the subversive nature of humor as a means to talk back to power through the side of one’s mouth, to work on levels too fast and facile to register in the minds of self-righteous oppressors — a kind of political Capoeira, an expansive, complicated, lethal dance with the truth.

“To declare the meaningfulness is to curse the poem.”

Time for morning coffee at Maggie’s Buns, where resisting the iced cinnamon bun is equally as difficult as resisting tidy philosophical conclusions in the first-person confessional lyric.

After hearing Marvin Bell read last night, I realize my assertion that he could levitate a space ship with his mind was somewhat understated. In fact, some might be downright confused by me comparing him to Yoda: is he green? does he have pointy ears? Not to my knowledge. He does invert syntax to bring pressure and rhythm to language — but, unlike Yoda, in doing so, Marvin remains grammatically correct.

There really are two aspects of Yoda that remind me of Bell. First, Yoda is a master teacher of an unteachable magic called the force. Second, and most importantly, in Episode II (the fifth film ever made) George Lucas gave every Star Wars junkie what they had long craved: the opportunity to see Yoda wield a light saber himself. With blinding alacrity and consummate skill, Yoda shows himself not only as a master teacher, but master practitioner. After Marvin’s poetry reading last night, a fellow student leaned over to me in the darkened theater and whispered, “he’s a genius.” Having spent last semester studying with him, I wanted to whisper back, “well, duh.”

The poetry craft talks so far have been broad and encompassing in their scope, and, true-to-form, Sandra Alcosser’s talk this afternoon was no exception. She spoke of the 4,000-year-old wisdom tradition that is literature, as the room filled up with the white Northern light of a solstice afternoon. She cited Shakespeare’s education in reading, translating, and memorizing the rhymed iambics of Ovid, and Whitman’s conversion from disdain of “un-American” opera to his assertion later that he could not have written Leaves Of Grass without having heard Bellini’s “Norma.”

In contrast to all the academic banter (especially among Americans) about eschewing received forms, Alcosser cited example after example of how genius in art consists not only, as Bell stated earlier, in getting in touch with one’s own “wiring” — but also in synthesizing tradition with newness. In fitting parallel with the theme of the talk, the question-and-answer session afterward opened out into a dialog among journeyman and accomplished writers alike about the remarkable and necessary tradition of literature, and the courage it takes to enter such a conversation with greatness.

“Genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with your own wiring.”

Joseph Millar and Marvin Bell, both former faculty advisors during my study at Pacific, conducted a roundtable discussion around the theme of what writing poetry teaches one about poetry itself. At the forefront of their message was: write! As in, do it.

They focused on the necessity of the process to their lives (not the product) — the quality of humility necessary when coaxing out new work (Millar), and the freedom necessary to write long enough, and bad enough, to get better (Bell).

In this sense, Marvin’s admonition that poetry is a way of life, not a career, and Joe’s analogy that keeping on writing limbers one’s muscles to be flexible and receptive to the dance, renders complimentary angles to a simple but profound message: writing is about writing. Talk is talk. Publication is nice; a fleeting pleasure. Writing.

Hearing about the importance of process, and the transitory pleasure of product, reminded me once again of this great little animation of a recording by Alan Watts.

I had a pleasant journey from Ojai to Forest Grove (via LAX, via PDX) and am now settling in to the spare-yet-tranquil accommodations of Vandervelden Hall (the other dorms from the ones I stayed in last time). Dinner was the combo #2 at Pizza Schmizza — greasy cheese pizza and green salad, my version of a “balanced” meal — and some lively conversation about narrative structure. Clearly, we’re hungry for the feast now laid out before us: eight days packed with workshops, craft talks, thesis reviews of graduating students (sniff, sniff) and evening readings from some of the best writers and teachers of writing anywhere in the country (no bias there). This is gonna be good.

After attending a wonderful recital as part of the Ojai Music Festival this afternoon, I was moved to write the following response to the celebrated concert pianist Krystian Zimerman’s recent announcement that he would not schedule future performances in America, in protest of the Iraq war.

Dear Mr. Zimerman:

I am not a musician. I am an American poet. My wife is English, and was a concert pianist in Europe for twenty years. She now teaches in America. In the four years we have been married, she has taught me very much about the love of classical music.

When she told me that you had decided not to continue performing in America in protest of our country’s foreign policy, I was, at first, upset for selfish reasons. I was upset as an audience member, deprived of the opportunity to hear you perform in person, and as an American conflated with the actions of my country’s political leaders.

This afternoon, we attended a recital by Dawn Upshaw and Gil Kalish in our home town. The passion and precision with which they rendered Lieder, French song, and American repertoire moved me very much, as it did hundreds of others around me. This experience reminded me, once again, of the power of art to help us become more fully in touch with our better selves. America needs to be more fully in touch with its better self in order to change. America needs more transcendent music, more meaningful art — not less.

And so, I write to you now not as an audience member protesting your decision for selfish reasons, but as one artist to another. If you were simply an entertainer, I could understand your embargo: my country is glutted with entertainment. It distracts us from looking at difficult circumstances, and also from our better selves. But you are an artist, and art has the power to transcend political concerns, addressing, instead, universal, human concerns.

Science has given us a great respect for visible, reproducible cause and effect. The effect of Dawn Upshaw giving herself completely in to song in today’s performance is not an event which I can guarantee will stop a war, open dialog between nations, end poverty, or restore respect for human rights. Yet I know I was changed, and bettered, by this experience. I know others were as well.

In my country, we have figured out how to engineer a hamburger that costs less than one dollar. Yet for all our wealth, when it comes to art, we are starving. By refusing to perform in America, you only add to our hunger. In fact, you are following the same line of policy that my country has pursued in relation to much of the rest of the world: closing off dialog.

Commission, instead, a new piece by a contemporary Middle Eastern composer, and bring this to America. If you want to better the world, do not withhold your gift from those of us who need it most. Instead, bring my country a reminder of our better selves, as human beings, and our participation in the global human condition. Bring the full power of music. And trust that, though it may not make headlines, no act of generosity or kindness is ever wasted, on any people, anywhere.

My country needs — desperately needs — now more than ever, more music, more art, not less. I implore you, as an artist, to please consider this.

Very Respectfully,
Robert Peake

I am currently researching how best to get this letter to Mr. Zimerman. If anyone reading this has any leads, please let me know.

In one month’s time, I will be nearing the end of the fourth residency of the Pacific University MFA, preparing to head in to my fourth and final semester of correspondence work. I feel as though I blinked, and suddenly have reached the three-quarters-done mark. And, although I have given close reading to well over sixty works so far, I also feel as though I have just begun to chip away at the tip of the iceberg that is poetry. I am thinking about reading mostly heavy-hitting Modern poets in the coming semester, in an effort to fill in some gaps in my experience of their work. Here is my list so far:

• Yehuda Amichai, Love Poems
• John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems
• John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs: Poems
• Robert Bly, Silence In The Snowy Fields
• James Dickey, Drowning With Others
• Richard Hugo, The Lady In Kicking Horse Reservoir
• Rolf Jacobsen, The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems
• Randall Jarrell, The Lost World
• Paul Mariani, The Great Wheel
• Thomas Merton, In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems
• W.S. Merwin, The Lice
• Frank O’Hara, Meditations In An Emergency
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
• Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck
• Jon Silkin, New and Selected Poems
• W.D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle
• Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Thomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
• Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
• William Carlos Williams, Spring And All
• William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

That’s more than the recommended twenty works (and notice I have deliberately not added any books about poetry) — so, I will have to trim and tinker.

Any suggestions, anyone?

Multiple friends on separate occasions mentioned the news that a collection of William McGonagal’s poems had been auctioned for £6,600. He was, apparently, to poetry what Florence Foster Jenkins was to classical song: an unintentional laughing-stock. Unfortunately, this is the poetry news that reaches my non-poet friends: that old bad poems get sold for lots of money.

New bad poems, unfortunately, won’t fare so well. Like classical song, nineteenth-century verse requires certain talents. Reading through samples of McGonagal’s poems, his lack of talent, particularly with regard to scansion, is evident. He hurls headlong with great effort toward each end-rhyme and, in the process, makes statements and observations so obvious and banal as to be surprising, almost childlike, in how unremarkable they are. In fact, many of his poems read like children’s attempts at formal verse. Furthermore, such “innocent” poetry stumbles in to unintentional humor.

Contemporary poetry is irrevocably different than nineteenth-century verse. This semester, Marvin Bell has been been encouraging me to attempt to write “bad” poetry, to “fall on my face” linguistically, to get myself into situations where I am “hopelessly lost but still typing.” It has been an invigorating antidote to my tendency to write neat, short poems. But it is precisely because contemporary poetry seeks to break rules (and thereby discover more interesting territory) that we will never again see a single, definitive “worst poet” in our time. In the absence of a centralized governing aesthetic, we no longer have a stick by which to measure “worst.”

Believe me, I am not saying there aren’t a lot of bad poems out there — genuinely bad poems, written by poets equally lacking in self-awareness as McGonagal. People are still writing awkward verse. Others are trying to pass off prose as poetry. Still others will try to convince you that their cerebral and wholly unmoving twelve-line exercise in linguistics can be justified by a several-hundred-page dissertation. But audiences no longer feel sufficient confidence to hurl rotten eggs or fruit. They hesitate. This may be due to a certain mystique in which contemporary poetry has managed to defensively enshroud itself. But also, the line between “bad” and “great” (not good, but great) seems thinner than ever in this iconoclast medium.

Even, for example, in Flarf, the deliberate attempt to write indisputably bad poetry, interesting nuggets often emerge which, taken up in the hands of a talented writer, can lead to remarkable poems. As Marvin says in this video, “sometimes the worst part of a poem contains the seeds of something that will be terrific if the person would just push it further.” In this sense, the creative, generative act of writing a contemporary poem is one in which “best” and “worst” must cease to exist for awhile, in service to a kind of exploration I call spelunking in consciousness.

In order to write, we must be willing to explore, and we must be willing to fail. We must be willing to write our McGonagal lines - what Ellen Bass calls “platforms” — because without the McGonagals in our creative process, we end up settling for good instead of great or, worse, being gagged by the inner critic and ceasing to write at all. In this sense, while there may never be another McGonagal per se in post-postmodern literature, there is, perhaps now more than ever, a little McGonagal in us all.